Richard Linklater took 12 years to make Boyhood. In 2025, he made two films

Richard Linklater

Photo: Sarah K Joyce / CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)

Born	July 30, 1960 Houston, Texas, USA
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	Before Sunrise, Boyhood, Before Sunset
Awards	Silver Bear · Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, 64th Berlin International Film Festival (2014), Boyhood · Golden Globe · BAFTA · César

The contradiction at the center of Richard Linklater’s career is not that he makes slow films. It is that he believes cinema should move at the speed of life — and then keeps making more of it, faster than almost anyone else working today.

He arrived in Austin, Texas, in 1983 — he was twenty-two, had grown up in Houston, and had recently left offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico with savings enough for a Super-8 camera. The rigs funded the camera; the camera funded the idea. He watched European art films at the local cinema, founded the Austin Film Society in 1985 to screen the work the multiplex would not, and spent seven years making a movie that cost $23,000 and changed what American independent cinema thought it was allowed to do. Slacker, released in 1991, had no protagonist, no plot to resolve, and a conviction that what people said to each other in parking lots and diners was, by itself, worth watching. It was.

Dazed and Confused followed in 1993 — an ensemble comedy set across a single day in 1976 that launched Matthew McConaughey’s career and established the structure Linklater has returned to throughout his work: a group of people, a bounded time, and the accumulation of what passes between them. Critics called it a hangout film, meaning organized by feeling rather than event, by presence rather than plot. He has never entirely left that sensibility.

What he brought to it, beginning with Before Sunrise in 1995, was ambition. The film — shot in Vienna with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, following two strangers through a single night of conversation — won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival and initiated one of cinema’s most unusual projects: a trilogy whose second and third installments, Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), were filmed nine years apart each time. Each film records not just the fictional relationship but the actual aging of its actors. Linklater was not making a romantic trilogy. He was making a documentary about time, disguised as one.

Waking Life (2001) pushed the formal experiment further, deploying rotoscope animation — live footage traced into painted images — to make a film about lucid dreaming and philosophical consciousness. School of Rock (2003), a comedy about a failed musician posing as a substitute teacher, became his biggest commercial success and proved that the experimental instinct and the mainstream audience were not mutually exclusive. A Scanner Darkly (2006) returned to rotoscope for a Philip K. Dick adaptation about identity erasure under surveillance.

Then, beginning in 2002, Linklater started filming a boy named Ellar Coltrane growing up. Boyhood — shot across twelve years in fragments, assembled into a single narrative about childhood in Texas — was released in 2014. Two Silver Bears from Berlin, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and three Academy Award nominations followed. The film cost $4 million to make and earned $48 million. More importantly, it demonstrated what Linklater had been building toward since Slacker: cinema as a medium for capturing duration, the thing that cannot be faked.

This is where the critical conversation about Linklater’s work gets complicated. For all the sophistication of his formal vocabulary, his films have consistently given their most complex interiority to male characters. The Before trilogy, celebrated as a literary achievement in cinema, tracks a dispiriting arc for Céline — philosophically incisive in Before Sunrise, increasingly reactive in Before Sunset, and reduced by Before Midnight to a marital antagonist whose grievances exist primarily to pressure the male character’s sense of self. In Dazed and Confused, the female characters occupy the perimeter of a male social world. Linklater has not publicly engaged with these critiques, and they resurface with each new work.

The recent output suggests no course correction, but considerable acceleration. Hit Man (2023), a romantic crime comedy co-written with Glen Powell and acquired by Netflix, became a critical favorite. Blue Moon (2025), a biopic of lyricist Lorenz Hart starring Ethan Hawke — their ninth collaboration across three decades — premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Andrew Scott won the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance. Nouvelle Vague (2025), a formally inventive essay about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, premiered at Cannes and became, at the 51st César Awards in February 2026, the film for which Linklater became the first American-born director to win France’s highest filmmaking honor.

He has lived in Austin for forty-three years. The Austin Film Society, which he founded in his twenties, continues operating as a cinematheque and education center. He has three children; his daughter Lorelei appears throughout Boyhood, aging on-screen as her father filmed her.

The project he is developing with Paul Mescal is an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, conceived to film periodically across twenty years as its actors age into their roles — a structural echo of Boyhood that will not conclude until 2040. A second film, set in nineteenth-century Concord among Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, with Ethan Hawke as Emerson, is already in production.

The man who invented a cinema of accumulation keeps accumulating.